The mark on the wall

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Woolf, Virginia (Stephen)
The mark on the wall

604

THE MARK ON THE
WALL

<By
VIRGINIA WOOLF

SECOND EDITION

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HOGARTH PRESS, RICHMOND
1919

First Published
Second Edition

July 1917
June 1919

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THE MARK ON THE
WALL

By VIRGINIA WOOLF

PERHAPS it was the middle of January in the
present year that I first looked up and saw the
mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is
necessary to remember what one saw. So now I
think of the fire; the steady film of yellow light
upon the page of my book ; the three chrysanthemums in
the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must
have been the winter time, and we had just finished our
tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when
I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first
time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette
and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals,
and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the
castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the
cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black
rock. Rather to my relief the sight of the mark inter-
rupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic
fancy, made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small
round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or
seven inches above the mantelpiece.

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object,
lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so j
feverishly, and then leave it. ... If that mark was
made by a nail, it can't have been for a picture, it must
have been for a miniature — the miniature of a lady with
white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips
like red carnations. A fraud of course, for the people

2 THE MARK ON THE WALL

who had this house before us would have chosen pic-
tures in that way — an old picture for an old room. That
is the sort of people they were — very interesting people,
and I think of them so often, in such queer places, be-
cause one will never see them again, never know what
happened next. She wore a flannel collar round her
throat, and he drew posters for an oatmeal company,
and they wanted to leave this house because they wanted
to change their style of furniture, so he said, and he was
in process of saying that in his opinion^ art should have
ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn
from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young
man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the
suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.

But as for that mark, I'm not sure about it; I don't
believe it was made by a nail after all ; it's too big, too
round, for that. I might get up, but if I got up and
looked at it, ten to one I shouldn't be able to say for
certain; because once a thing's done, no one ever knows
how it happened. O dear me, the mystery of life! The
inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity!
To show how very little control of our possessions we
have — what an accidental affair this living is after all
our civilisation — let me just count over a few of the
things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems
always the most mysterious of losses — what cat would
gnaw, what rat would nibble three pale blue canisters
of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages,
the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-
scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ — all gone,
and jewels too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the
roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to
be sure ! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back,
that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment.
Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must
liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles
an hour — landing at the other end without a single hair-
pin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely

THE MARK OX THE WALL 3

naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel
meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a
shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back
like the tail of a race-horse. Yes,, that seems to express
the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so
casual, all so haphazard. . . .

But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green
stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over,
deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all,
should one not be born there as one is born here, help-
less, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping
at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for
saying which are trees, and which are men and women,
or whether there are such things, that one won't be in
a condition to do for fifty years or so. There will be
nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by
thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped
blots of an indistinct colour — dim pinks and blues —
which will, as time goes on, become more definite, be-
come— I don't know what. . . .

And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It
may even be caused by some round black substance, such
as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I,
not being a very vigilant housekeeper — look at the dust
on the mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so
they say, buried Troy three times over, only fragments
of pots utterly refusing annihilation, as one can believe.
... I know a housekeeper, a woman with the profile of
a policeman, those little round buttons marked even
upon the edge of her shadow, a woman with a broom in
her hand, a thumb on picture frames, an eye under beds,
and she talks always of art. She is coming nearer and
nearer; and now, pointing to certain spots of yellow
rust on the fender, she becomes so menacing that to
oust her, I shall have to end her by taking action: I
shall have to get up and see for myself what that mark —

But no. I refuse to be beaten. I will not move. I will
not recognise her. See, she fades already. I am very

4 THE MARK ON THE WALL

nearly rid of her and her insinuations, which I can hear
quite distinctly. Yet she has about her the pathos of all
people who wish to compromise. And why should I
resent the fact that she has a few books in her house, a
picture or two? But what I really resent is that she re-
sents me — life being jin affair of attack and defence
after all. Another time I will have it out with her, — not
now. She must go now. . . . The tree outside the
window taps very gently on the pane. ... I want to
think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be inter-
rupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily
from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility,
or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from
the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady my-
self, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes. . . .
VjBhakespeare. . . . Well, he will do as well as another.
A man who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and
looked into the fire, so—. A shower of ideas fell per-
petually from some very high Heaven down through his
mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and people,
looking in through the open door, — for this scene is
supposed to take place on a summer's evening, — But
how dull this is, this historical fiction ! It doesn't interest
me at all. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of
thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself,
for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent
even in the minds of modest mouse-coloured people,
who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own
praises. They are not thoughts directly praising oneself;
that is the beauty of them ; they are thoughts like this :

"And then I came into the room. They were dis-
cussing botany. I said how I'd seen a flower growing on
a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway.
The seed, I said, must have been sown in the reign of
Charles the First. What flowers grew in the reign of
Charles the First? I asked — (but I don't remember the
answer). Tall flowers with purple tassels to them per-
haps. And so it goes on. All the time I'm dressing up the

THE MARK ON THE WALL 5

figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly, stealthily,
not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch
nryself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in
self-protection. Indeed, it is curious how instinctively
one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any
other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too
unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it
not so very curious after all? It is a matter of great im-
portance. Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image
disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of
forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that
shell of a person which is seen by other people — what an
airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes!
A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in
omnibuses and underground railways we are looking
into the mirror; that accounts for the expression of
vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And the
novelists in future will realise more and more the im-
portance of these reflections, for of course there is not
one reflection but an almbsttnfinite number; those are
the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they
will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and
more out of tKeir stories, taking a knowledge of it for
granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps —
\ but these generalisations are very worthless. The
military sound of the word is enough. It recalls leading
articles, cabinet ministers — a whole class of things
indeed which as a child one thought the thing itself, the
standard thing, the real thing, from which one could not
depart save at the risk of nameless damnation. General-
isations bring back somehow Sunday in London,
Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also
ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits — like
the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain
hour, although nobody liked it. There was a rule for
everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular
period was that they should be made of tapestry with
little yellow compartments marked upon them, such as

6 THE MARK ON THE WALL

you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corri-
dors of the royal palaces'. Tablecloths of a different kind
were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how
wonderful it was to discover that these real things,
Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and
tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half
phantoms, and the damnation which visited the dis-
believer in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom.
What now takes the place of those things, I wonder,
those real standard things? Men perhaps, should you
be a woman ; the masculine point of view which governs
our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes
Whitaker's Table of Precedency, which has become, I
suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and
women, which soon, one may hope, wiirbe laughed into
the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany side-
boards and Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and
so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of
illegitimate freedom — if freedom exists. . . .

In certain lights, that mark on the wall seems actually
to project from the wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I
cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow,
suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the
wall it would, at a certain point, mount and descend a
small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrows on
the South Downs which are, they say, either tombs or
camps. Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs,
desiring melancholy like most English people and
finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the
bones stretched beneath the turf. . . . There must be
some book about it. Some antiquary must have dug up
those bones and given them a name. . . . What sort of
man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired colonels for the
most part, I daresay, leading parties of aged labourers to
the top here, examining clods of earth and stone, and
getting into correspondence with the neighbouring
clergy, which, being opened at breakfast time, gives them
a feeling of importance, and the comparison of arrow-

THE MARK ON THE WALL 7

heads necessitates cross-country journeys to the county
towns, an agreeable necessity both to them and to their
elderly wives, who wish to make plum jam, or to clean
out the study, and have every reason for keeping that
great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual sus-
pension, while the Colonel himself feels agreeably
philosophic in accumulating evidence on both sides of
the question. It is true that he does finally incline to
believe in the camp; and, being opposed, casts all his
arrowheads into one scale, and being still further
opposed, indites a pamphlet which he is about to read
at the quarterly meeting of the local society when a stroke
lays him low, and his last conscious thoughts are not of
wife or child, but of the camp and that arrowhead
there, which is now in the case at the local museum, to-
gether with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful
of Elizabethan nails, a great many Tudor clay pipes, a
piece of Roman pottery, and the wine-glass that Nelson
drank out of — proving I really don't know what.

No, no, nothing^ is proved, nothing is known. And if
I Were "to get up at this very moment and ascertain that
the mark on the wall is really — what shall we say? — the
head of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years
ago, which has now, owing to the patient attrition of
many generations of housemaids, revealed its head above
the coat of paint, and is taking its first view of modern
life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what
should I gain? — Knowledge? Matter for further
speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing
up. And what is knowledge? What are our learned men
save the descendants of witches and hermits who
crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interro-
gating shrew-mice, and writing down the language of
the stars? And the less we honour them as our super-
stitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of
mind increases. . . . Yes, one could imagine a very
pleasant world. A quiet spacious world, with the
flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world

8 THE MARK ON THE WALL

without professors or specialists or house-keepers with
the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice
with ones thought as a fish slices the water with his fin,
grazing the stems of the water-lilies, hanging sus-
pended over nests of white sea eggs. . . . How peaceful
it is down here, rooted into the centre of the world and
gazing up through the gray waters, with their sudden
gleams of light, and their reflections — If it were not for
Whitaker's Almanack — if it were not for the Table of
' Precedency!

I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on
the wall really is — a nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?

Here is Nature once more at her old game of self-
preservation. This train of thought, she perceives, is
threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision
with reality, for who will ever be able to lift a finger
against Whitaker's Table of Precedency? The Arch-
bishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High
Chancellor; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by
the Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody,
such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing
is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows, and
let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of
enraging you; and if you can't be comforted, if you must
shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the
wall.

I understand Nature's game — her prompting to take
action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to
excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight
contempt for men of action- — men, we assume, who
don't think. Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop
to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on
the wall.

Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel I
have grasped a plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense
of reality which at once turns the two Archbishops and
the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades.
Here is something definite, something real. Thus,

THE MARK ON THE WALL 9

waking from a midnight dream of horror one hastily
turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the
chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping
reality, worshipping the Impersonal world which is a
proof of some existence other than ours. That is what
one wants to be sure of. ... Wood is a pleasant thing
to think about. It comes from a tree ; and trees grow, and
we don't know how they grow. For years and years they
grow, without paying any attention to us, in meadows,
in forests and by the side of rivers — all things one likes
to tnink about. The cows swish their tails beneath them
on hot afternoons; they paint rivers so green that when
a moor-hen dives one expects to see its feathers all green
when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish
balanced against the stream like flags blown out; and of
water-beetles slowly raising domes of mud upon the bed
of the river. I like to think of the tree itself; first the close
dry sensation of being wood; then there is the grinding
of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I
like to think of it, too, on winter's nights standing in the
empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender
exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast
upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all night
long. The song of birds must sound very loud and
strange in June; and how cold the feet of insects must
feel upon it, as they make laborious progresses up the
creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin
green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of
them with huge diamond-cut red eyes. . . . One by on?
the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the
earth; then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest
branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so, life
isn't done with; there are a million patient, watchful,
lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in
ships, on the pavement, lining rooms where men and
women sit after tea, smoking their cigarettes. It is full
of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I
should like to take each one separately — but something

IO THE MARK ON THE WALL

is getting in the way. . . . Where was I? What has it all
been about? A tree? A river? The Downs, Whitaker's
Almanack, the fields of asphodel? I can't remember a
thing. Everything's moving, falling, slipping, vanish-
ing. . . . There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is
standing over me and saying —

"I'm going out to buy a newspaper."

"Yes?"

"Though it's no good, buying newspapers. . . .
Nothing ever happens. Curse this war! God damn this
war!. . . . All the same, I don't see why we should
have a snail on our wall."

Ah, the mark on the wall ! It was a snail.

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1919

Woolf, Virginia (Stephen)
The mark on the wall